Mansour Shayegan has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recognizing his distinguished work in semiconductor physics.
The academy’s class of 2026 includes 252 leaders in academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, policy, research and science. The new members will be inducted at a ceremony in October in Cambridge, Mass.
Shayegan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, explores the physics of semiconductors, with a focus on their electronic properties. His lab grows exceptionally pure semiconductor samples and studies them to observe subatomic particles and their interactions. In a 2021 project his lab created the world’s purest sample of gallium arsenide, a semiconductor used in devices that power technologies like cell phones and satellites. He observed unexpected behavior under relatively weak magnetic fields. These observations had no established theoretical framework, and opened new ground for physicists to explore.
In another study, Shayegan confirmed a century-old theory that certain kinds of materials, when drawn down to a very low electron density, would spontaneously magnetize. His team used an ultra-pure semiconductor to explore what happens to electrons as they become less densely packed in a two-dimensional space, a plane between two solids that is only one particle deep. Advancing insight into the fundamental behaviors of electrons can play a role in the development of technologies like quantum computers and quantum sensors.
The Academy elected seven Princeton faculty members in total. The others are Mark Aguiar, Adele Goldberg, Noreen Goldman, Jenny Greene, Melissa Lane and Atif Mian.
Shayegan earned his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has received Princeton’s Graduate Mentoring Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Humboldt Prize and a Fulbright Fellowship, among others. Shayegan is a Gordon and Betty Moore Materials Synthesis Investigator and an elected fellow of the American Physical Society.
